Under a spell

Two men are locked in a face-off. One, shouting in the high voice of a hysterical child, refuses to leave a hypnotic trance. The other, a hypnotist, is trying to take him out. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” cries the first, clamping a pillow over his head, “I don’t want to hear you.” The hypnotist tensely stands his ground: “Listen to my voice. Come here.”

The encounter appears on a tape playing on a video monitor in the white-walled expanse of the Anton Kern Gallery, in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. It was performance art, unfolding live in front of about 200 people who applauded when the rebellious man-boy crawled on his belly under a cot, then let the hypnotist take him out of his trance. The situation might seem artificial. But how unreal was it? What would have happened if the artist had never listened to the numbers the hypnotist counted -- “eight, nine, 10, wake up” -- to bring him back? And just what does it mean, this eerily tantalizing sight of two men, one gripped by the suggestion of the other, both apparently subject to a force beyond their control? Matt Mullican, a New York-based artist raised in Santa Monica, has been provoking questions about consciousness and reality with hypnosis performances, like this one in November, for about 30 years. One European admirer has called him the James Joyce of performance art, but the artist believes that what emerges from his rare method of turning his mind inside out for art mirrors a media-saturated society, developing technologies and a kind of self-exposure that Joyce never knew. The tape of his performance is part of an installation -- it includes a scattery abstract painting in black paint of what looks somewhat like a primitive figure, made while in the trance -- that remains on view at the Kern for another week.

A low-key buzz about the installation has grown. The New Yorker magazine, in its Jan. 13 issue, published a gallery review of the performance, the first Mullican has offered in New York since 1982. Noting the piece’s intriguing ambiguity and its impact, the review declared: “Whether authentic or enacted, it’s startling.”

Mullican has given trance performances in a range of settings: the streets of Brussels, an elegant Berlin gallery, experimental art spaces in Los Angeles. He sometimes tries to limit their “embarrassing” exposure with invitation-only groups -- as he did three years ago at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. On tapes of them, countless shadings of seemingly unmediated human emotions stream to surface -- mental states, fixations. Painting is just one part of what could irreverently be called his hypnosis vaudeville. He sings Elvis songs, or intently, repetitively sniffs the walls of a gallery as though the smell might disclose a secret of life. He flops over a stack of metal chairs, singing as he paints the number 10 over and over; rages at the power the hypnotist represents -- “It’s like the authority of a parent, or just power, plain power” -- to his trance-heightened imagination.

Mullican’s trance work, at least the extent of it, is less known than that of other former stars of performance art, including Chris Burden and Vito Acconci, whose work is studied these days in universities where performance -- that diverse outgrowth of dance, theater, ritual and the visual arts -- is taught. Hearing that Mullican still does it surprises even some people with long memories of the performance art world.

But it’s a thread he’s followed from his student days at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, through his 30 years in New York, persistently meshing old layers of experiment with new ones. In 1991, taking up an offer from French culture officials, he put on virtual-reality goggles and a glove that enabled him to walk around an imaginary city he built with the help of programmers. It was, he says, the natural outgrowth of his first “very low-tech” virtual reality: “Hypnosis,” he says, “is virtual.”

And the role of computers and cyberspace in our lives, he says, makes this an increasingly hypnotic world.

‘You are very thirsty’

Mullican is best known for making large industrially fabricated banners, and architectural charts, often bearing the symbols of a dauntingly complex, highly personal philosophy about psychology and aesthetics. When he has shows in New York or Los Angeles, papers dispatch their critics, who often -- not always -- recommend it. But even admirers who follow that work rarely dwell much on the trance performances.

The performances -- he counts 27 since 1973 -- usually last about an hour. They start when the hypnotist puts him into the trance, giving the first verbal hypnotic suggestion: “You are very thirsty,” for example. The suggestions are worked out in advance by artist and hypnotist.

After the first suggestion, he returns to the cot or chair, where the hypnotist waits, and receives new ones. After four or five suggestions, the hypnotist takes him out. He wakes up, but never in quite the same state. Sometimes, he says, he’s relaxed and refreshed. He can also emerge anguished, unable to shake a so-called hypnosis hangover that can linger for days or weeks and leave him feeling “pulled apart, exhausted and a victim of the process.”

Mullican said he still felt the last traces from the Kern performance when he welcomed a visitor to his SoHo studio in January to talk about hypnosis as the raw stuff of art. He speaks of hypnosis as a full sibling to conventional art forms like dance and theater. He welcomes questions about whether his performances are genuine or acted, he said, because that doubt amounts to a basic perception about the nature of these pieces. His main goal, he said, is to make viewers think about the self and the world in a new way.

Barbara Vanderlinden is a curator at a small art space in Brussels who put together 18 Mullican hypnosis performances over a week, 10 hours’ worth in different settings. “To me, it is like Joyce,” she said. “It becomes an endless subjective reality where lots of things are happening at once.”

Mullican never gets literary, but says he is mainly intrigued by the volatile relationships between the insinuating power of language, embodied in the hypnotist’s verbal commands, and the malleable receptivity of the mind. And he compares the hypnotized person acting on the hypnotic commands to people in contemporary mass culture, responding at a deep level to commercial advertising and political speeches.

“I went to eat with a friend,” Mullican said. “We were sitting at a counter and he suddenly said, ‘I feel like having a Coke,’ and he ordered one. Then he turned to me and said, ‘Now, why did I order that Coke. I haven’t had a Coke in years.’ I pointed to a sign behind the counter that said ‘Drink Coke’ and he was amazed, because he realized that was it. It’s everywhere. If we buy something or Bush gives a speech saying we should go to war, we’re always going in and out of trances, all day long.”

His performances draw no obvious connection between the suggestions of hypnosis and mass-market or political imagery. But Mullican says he wants to help audiences reflect on those implications. “Just watch television,” he said. “The media is all based on the idea of seduction, getting us to feel certain things and do certain things. The hypnosis takes all of this and demonstrates it in a very overt way.”

More questions than answers

Mullican is the son of the late Lee Mullican, a Los Angeles painter known for gently dynamic canvases with deep links to surrealism, abstract expressionism and the Indian culture of the American Southwest. His mother Luchita is also a painter. “My father had a goal, an ideal about painting the truth that he was aiming toward with the work,” Matt Mullican said. “He was a modernist. I’m a postmodernist. He had a kind of answer. I’m mainly asking questions.”

Mullican attended CalArts with a group that includes painters David Salle and Eric Fischl and learned to navigate a subtle middle ground between artistic expression and philosophical analysis from leading artist-teacher John Baldessari. Mullican said, though, that his curiosity about hypnosis dates back to childhood, when he saw cartoon characters on TV getting hypnotized. “There were those spirals going round and round,” he said. “There was a lot of hypnosis on TV.”

In a 1973 performance that he describes as probably the first time he experimented with hypnosis, Mullican said he stared himself into a trance looking at an old Italian print of a stone arch in front of an audience. He narrated his experience, talking about how sure he was that he was getting wet from rain because his trance-intensified imagination believed the painting’s sunny weather had suddenly changed.

Several years later, he wanted to project the implications he saw in hypnosis with a more theatrical performance. He found an ad for a hypnotist -- “all I remember is that his first name was Jerome” -- who used it as a method to help actors prepare for roles. Mullican developed a piece for three actors put in trances, performing episodes from an imaginary woman’s life.

After that, Mullican dropped the actors and started to have a hypnotist put him into a trance, a sensation he likens to “super jet lag, where you have energy but at the same time are exhausted. You are in control and you’re not.”

All of his work, which has embraced media as varied as neon, stone, rugs and film, has probed mental states and human behavior, he said. The hypnosis, in the view of Vanderlinden, is “the perfect vehicle to move between worlds.”

His past three performances have been with Silver Lake hypnotist and multimedia artist Marcos Lutyens. At the Kern, Lutyens used his low, steady voice to give Mullican the series of hypnotic suggestions they’d formulated:

“You are very cold,” and “You are an 18-year-old pretending to be 4 or 5,” and “You are going to paint,” and “You are reading the newspaper.” The sequence, Mullican said, is “a kind of narrative.”

“I use a method called stacking,” Lutyens said, of how he gets Mullican into a trance.

“I say that you are at the top of a flight of stairs, and then I count as I take you down the stairs. I say, ‘You are feeling relaxed.’ I say, ‘You are getting more relaxed as you go down,’ until the person is at the bottom. Another method I used with Matt is the engine room. I say he is starting on the bridge of a ship and that he is going down steps into the engine room, below the surface level of the water. It is the engine room of consciousness.”

During a 1998 performance in Berlin, Mullican said, the engine-room suggestion went awry. “I started thinking I was an engine,” Mullican said. During the performance, he put some coins in a cup. A tape shows him shaking it compulsively, pacing, saying, “Marcos, you’ve turned me into an engine.” He urges: “It’s boring. Take me out.”

Eventually, Lutyens did count him out. But Mullican said the piece had degraded into “this pattern of madness,” and that he hovered within the grip of the engine-room suggestion well after the formal trance ended.

People watched nervously and without applauding, a tape shows, as he was urged out of the gallery by a friend.

Mullican said he was so angry about what happened that he imagined a performance segment about a conflict between a hypnotist and a subject who refuses to listen to him. Like a playwright finding his last act, Mullican fashioned a final suggestion for Lutyens to give him at the Kern: that Mullican would refuse to heed Lutyens’ urging to make the journey back to normal consciousness. That’s the drama people saw.

Now Mullican, 51, is thinking of changing hypnotists -- or going back to hypnotizing himself for an upcoming performance in Zurich.

He has regularly had hypnotists give him suggestions that purport to return him to the psyche of a child. Michael R. Nash, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a recognized authority on hypnosis, said the idea that a suggestion can reactivate a person’s childhood state of mind has been “thoroughly debunked.” Still, Nash said, the realms of hypnotic trance and the imagination overlap; the hypnotic experience feels involuntary. “These people believe they are 5 years old,” he said. “It is not consciously faking.” On hearing descriptions of Mullican’s performances, he added, “He seems to use hypnosis as part of his creative process. Like Method acting.”

Exactly, said Mullican. “I don’t say there isn’t acting in it. But it’s not all acting.”

But is it art?

For another week, the Kern will continue to show the hypnosis installation in a smallish, alcove-like space at the back. On a recent Saturday, Sherman Clarke, a librarian with New York University, was making his regular Saturday rounds of downtown galleries. He reached the monitor showing Mullican’s performance just as it began to build to the tortured final scenes. Clarke, trained as an art librarian, stood quietly against a wall, his white hair cropped close around sharp features and light blue eyes, and seemed to grow increasingly curious.

Of hypnosis, he said, at first: “I’m a little skeptical.” Mullican started screaming.

Did Clarke find it authentic?

“I don’t find it inauthentic.”

Did he have any problem seeing it as art?

“I’ve long since given up on the question ‘Is it art?’ ” Clarke said, smiling gently. “If it is presented as art, I will let it be art.”

Mullican was sitting up now, out of the trance. A broken, pleased smile crossed his face as he glanced at the applauding audience, then turned and walked out of sight.

“I find the shift from reason to unreason moving,” said Clarke, as he turned to leave. “I try to keep my anger under control. I don’t want to be hypnotized, because I don’t want to reveal things that I don’t want revealed. He is willing to open himself up, and I think that takes a certain” -- Clarke shrugged slightly -- “courage.”